Since 2002, LAF has refuted the follies of feminism and promoted a strong, intelligent, biblical view of womanhood. We love femininity and are delighted to share the beauties of the womanly virtues with women all over the world. New to LAF? Start here! Looking for older articles? Please visit the archives!

You have probably heard the saying before: A clean house is a sign of a wasted life. Whatever else the phrase means, it expresses some of the frustration and the sense of futility that attends life in this world. I thought of that saying when I spotted this proverb: “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox” (Proverbs 14:4). A little bit of research shows that commentators are divided on exactly what it means, but I think one of the explanations rises to the top.

According to this explanation, the proverb is about the messiness of a life well-lived. Tremper Longman says the moral is that “a productive life is a messy life.”

I’ve had this thought in my head for a while now. I’ve been thinking that I can’t afford for my wife to be a Stay-At-Home Mom. Now, I don’t at all mean to offend anyone with this post. I just have to say that for me personally, I can’t afford it. I’d like to explain exactly what I mean by that so that no one thinks I’m in any way devaluing Stay-At-Home Moms. On the contrary, I mean that I quite literally cannot afford my wife to be staying at home. Here’s why…

My wife stays home and takes care of our son every single day. She changes his diapers, feeds him, plays with him, puts him down for his nap, and comforts him when he’s upset. And that’s just the bare minimum. A child can typically get that attention at a day-care. But on top of that, he is her only focus. There’s no other children to tend to. He gets all of her. All of her love, all of her time, all of her energy. She is always there, always near, and always listening. Obviously, this is part of being a parent. You take care of your child and you raise your child. But let’s face it. In our day and age, every service (and I mean EVERY service) is hirable. There is a company ready and willing to do just about anything. So while, yes, my wife is my son’s mother and it is a natural result of being a parent to love and care for your own child, there is also a very quantifiable dollar amount that can be attributed to the services rendered.

[Editor’s Note: Making an idol of family is to place creation above the creator. This is as poor a solution as idolizing women, i.e. feminism. Eberstadt is mistaken. Creation does testify of a creator but the Creator came first. Scripture plainly states, In the beginning God…God created the family. The family didn’t create God; it also doesn’t create faith in God. “It is Christ who saves through faith” as B. B. Warfield puts it,

“The saving power resides exclusively, not in the act of faith or the attitude of faith or in the nature of faith, but in the object of faith.”

Faith is exclusively God’s. He blesses our obedience. It is not a wonder that the blessing of a greater degree of faith and knowledge of him coincides with our obedience as we walk according to His will, i.e. marrying how he said we should marry, having children how he said we should have children, raising families how He said we should raise families.

God existed first and when we find God through “committed human love” (a strange phrase meaning biblically defined heterosexual marriage) it is because God reveals himself in His creation. Rom. 1:20

Humanism will never save the human “species” read mankind. Whether woman lead or man lead and that is a takeaway point from this article. Women becoming like unregenerate men accomplishes nothing good with much devastating consequences. The biggest takeaway point is Jesus Christ must be head and men and women alike who have bowed the knee to Him will find their place in their God ordained jurisdictions, complimenting each other, establishing His kingdom and the blessed fruit of His reign.]

Writing for The Atlantic in September of 2012, Hanna Rosin argued that the “hookup culture” so prevalent on college campuses and in the lives of young adults is “an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.” She wrote:

To put it crudely, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hookup culture. And to a surprising degree, it is women not men—who are perpetuating the culture, especially in school, cannily manipulating it to make space for their success, always keeping their own ends in mind. For college girls these days, an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.

Jessica Kern was sixteen the day she found the missing puzzle piece that finally made her life make sense.

Growing up, Kern, now 30, had always suspected something wasn’t right about her household. It was more than just the emotional and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents. It was a deep and unsettling feeling that somehow, she didn’t really belong.

Kern grew up in an interracial home – her father was white; her mother, South Korean. Kern was raised as a half-Korean girl, attending Korean school on the weekends and her mother’s Korean church. But the mirror told a different story. Her appearance lacked even a trace of Asian ancestry. At times, she wondered if she’d been adopted.

The truth turned out to be much more complicated than that. At sixteen, a therapist she was seeing to help her deal with her parents’ abuse shared something hidden deep within her medical records: Kern was the product of a surrogacy arrangement. The woman who had raised her from birth was not, in fact, her biological mother.

A leading constitutional lawyer, and one of the leading attorneys (if not the leading one) involved in high profile surrogate parenting cases in the US, made that claim, and not lightly nor without deep knowledge of the issues involved. Harold Cassidy was chief counsel in the first contested surrogacy case in the United States that struck down surrogate mother contracts as unenforceable, the ‘Baby M’ case. Decades later, he’s now sounding alarms about the issue of surrogacy and where it’s headed. In New Jersey especially now, but far beyond ultimately.

Some fervently believe that if gestational surrogacy laws were to be widely accepted they would irreparably change human civilization. Gestational surrogacy is now front and center for debate, not only in New Jersey, but across the nation. It demands attention…

The Baby M court made the following observations: private adoptions are disfavored; the surrogacy arrangement places a child without any regard for the child’s best interests; it circumvents all laws that require counseling of the mother before she surrenders her rights; and the compulsion of the contract makes surrender of the child after birth not truly voluntary or informed. Beyond that, the arrangement exploits women as a “surrogate uterus” or an “incubator” and expects a mother to act as an inanimate object, which denigrates the woman in her role as mother.

Reason led me to acknowledge natural law, which led me to begin rejecting some of my former ways of thinking and acting. Reason alone was enough to lead me to change the direction of my life. Then quite amazingly, natural law and reason working together led me to recognize and acknowledge God’s existence. And once I acknowledged God’s existence, again there was only one reasonable thing to do: I asked Jesus Christ to take the throne of my life, and I began to reject the emptiness of my self-centered ways.

The true ideas I embraced had positive consequences in my life. When I look back on my earlier life, I see the converse is also true. As I first stepped out of the closet in the 1990s, I made a conscious decision to ignore natural law. Once I made that choice, I could not stop. Untethered from natural law, I could not draw a line regarding my behavior, nor could I justify making any sort of judgment regarding the behaviors of others. Should I condemn lending my tacit approval to the prostitution of young men and women and reject viewing pornography? Why? Should gay couples invite a third man into their bed? Sure, why not? Should gay partners who declare themselves monogamous be okay with having casual sexual encounters with other men? Sure! Committed throuples? Why not? Public nudity, group sex, sex in public? Who was I to judge?

As I observe the deteriorating trajectory of this nation’s judicial system, I am reminded of my own past. It’s hard to predict if and where our judges might draw the line on marriage and gender issues. They have rejected the solid foundation of natural law, leaving the whole house rickety and unsound, vulnerable to the slightest wind of political correctness or sophistry. And just as with the poor decisions I once made, children will be collateral damage, bearing the unintended negative consequences.

Have you ever started reading a story book in the middle, or tried to watch a movie starting halfway through the plot? I have, and though it is possible to figure out the gist of the story, it can be hard to have adequate context, and sometimes important details are missed. Most of all, the significance of events is lost on an audience who doesn’t understand the history of what has come before. Most people start in the middle of the gospel story, with man’s need of a savior and Christ’s atoning work on the cross. But while this is an appropriate message in some settings, if we never understand the beginning of the story, we’ll be left with a truncated view of the significance of the gospel. Instead of starting in the gospels, it’s crucial to start where God does… in the beginning.

On Sunday, March 22, the mother of four passed away, after close to three years of battling breast cancer.

“I feel like I’m a little girl at the party whose dad’s asking her to leave early, and I’m throwing a fit,” said Tippetts, crying a little, about her experience in the trailer for a documentary about her life. “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to go.”

On her blog, Mundane Faithfulness, Tippetts chronicled what she did with her last weeks. She wrote about entering hospice care: “My fight is for time and tenderness with my loves. My fight is to embrace the good moments hospice is giving me and loving my people well. It’s important~ these moments. All our moments are precious gifts.”

…dying with dignity is not dependent on whether you choose the time of your death or not. It isn’t about the exact circumstances of your death.

Tippetts clearly fought as hard as she could to eke out every last moment she could with her husband and children.

Doug Mainwaring, a self-described gay man who is abstinent, says marriage was a joke in the homosexual community ten years ago. Photo Credit: Winnie Okafor

Editor’s note: The loss of freedoms means restrictions and penalties in many areas. Hobby Lobby’s fight against Obama care. The government control of business is crippling our country. This explains Dolce and Gabbana’s interest in fighting for the preservation of marriage as defined by God.

Also, there is grace for those redeemed in Christ who abused alcohol and there is grace for those who suffer the temptation of sexual sin.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin. Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him. For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof. Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.(Romans 6:1-14)

Lifesite news reports:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The homosexual lobby’s effort to redefine marriage “is a form of incremental totalitarianism,” a self-described gay man told LifeSiteNews at the second annual March for Marriage in Washington, D.C.

Doug Mainwaring, who was a speaker at the March, spoke with LifeSiteNews after his brief presentation. Asked about his sexual orientation, he said, “I identify as gay in the same sense that an alcoholic who has been going to AA meetings for years would never fail to identify himself as an alcoholic.”

Noting that he “put that aside a few years ago,” Mainwaring said “the impulses are still within me.” But he said he opposes marriage redefinition because “same-sex ‘marriage’ is the most implausible idea to ever come down the pipe.”

“I don’t have to go into religious arguments. Just from natural law — and people even dismiss natural law nowadays,” said Mainwaring. “Even 10 years ago, in the gay community, it was a joke in the same-sex community. ‘This is my husband, ha ha ha.'”

“Gays and lesbians have been used as pawns by progressives to bring about this wedge issue that I really feel strongly is meant to usher in incremental totalitarianism,” he said.

The New York Timesis trying to stoke demand for the replacement of Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, citing his cruel treatment of Indians. That has a certain logic to it, whether or not you agree. Besides, the Times says, it’s time we had a woman on some of our currency. Again, fair enough.

But it’s hard to take the paper’s objections to racism or its respect for women seriously when one of the candidates presented in the Times‘ symposium is Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a sexual libertine who fought to make birth control not just legal but mandatory — for members of racial and social groups whom she considered “inferior.”

A devotee of the then-popular pseudoscience of eugenics, Sanger used its dubious theories to stoke the fears of native-born white Americans (mostly from Northern Europe) about the “inferior” genetic stock that was flooding into America from places like Italy, Poland and Russia.

Coincidentally, Christianity Today recently ran a sympathetic defense of Sanger, so there seems to be some collective amnesia about what she believed. I collected just a few choice quotes from Margaret Sanger (courtesy ofLive Action) that ought to do more than keep her face off our money; they should move us to cut off the $540 million in taxpayers’ money (as of 2013) that supports Planned Parenthood — an organization which performsone-fourth of America’s abortions, covers up cases of statutory rape and teaches teenagers “the ropes” about how to practice sadomasochism. Here’s one quote for each objection to honoring Sanger in any way.

Right off the bat we know 2 things as true: God desires us to be holy & the Holy Spirit is responsible for the process of sanctification (1 Peter 1.2). But this process is drawn out — and at times painful. Aren’t their any shortcuts? Perhaps some ‘spiritual accelerators’? Legalism would say yes.

“Hey christian,” suggests Legalism, “you want to be holy? Just follow this list of expectations:”

[Editor’s Note: One of the authors references evolution’s affect on survival due to parental bonds. We disagree with the premise that evolution exists. We do agree that family is key. Filial love is powerful as is the inherit nature which God designed that ties us to our parents, but more so than this is a godly heritage and the bonds of Christianity, faith passed on and shared; an impossibility by homosexual parenting. Any parents, homosexual and otherwise who knowingly, implicitly live outside the will of God will effectively ostracize their children. Natural born or otherwise they will be orphans drifting as is described by the first author of her psychology.]

This past week has seen the outrage generated by parents of donor and invitro-fertilization children following a now-infamous Panorama magazine interview conducted with the fashion designers Dolce & Gabbana, wherein Domenico Dolce proclaimed, “You are born to a mother and a father — or at least that’s how it should be. I call children of chemistry, synthetic children.” Immediately, Elton John advocated a boycott of the designers’ products in retaliation for the perceived offense against his two sons, who were conceived via an egg donor and surrogate mother.

Speaking as two donor-conceived young women—alive because of reproductive technologies—we felt an urgent need to respond…in support of Dolce and Gabbana.

I am indeed a human being. My liver, heart, hair, and enzymes all work the same. I’ve discovered it is my psychology that is different and not-quite-right, due to my conception. It’s not a matter for doctors to fix; it’s a spiritual problem. My father accepted money, and promised to have nothing to do with me. My mother was wonderful and I have always loved her deeply, as she has loved me. But my journey is a battle against the void left by my father’s absence, and a particular disability in understanding the difference between sacred and commercial, exploitation and cooperation. Those torments for me far outweigh any social stigma or momentarily painful gossip I’ve endured from ignorant people.

Harvard gastroenterologist Dr Hamed Khalili’s study of 230,000 American women found that those who had used the pill for five years or more had a 300 percent higher risk of developing Crohn’s disease than those who had never used it.

Dr Khalili explained that while oral contraceptive drugs do not directly cause Crohn’s disease, the synthetic hormones have side effects that contribute to the higher risk he identified.

These side effects include thinning of the lining of the gut making it less able to properly hold in digestive waste, a reduction of beneficial intestinal bacteria, and a negative effect on the immune system.

“What’s very clear is that Crohn’s is not caused by oral contraceptive use by itself. It’s a combination of oral contraceptive use among individuals with a strong genetic predisposition to Crohn’s,” Khalili told the Daily Mail.

“It’s an interaction between these two that significantly increases the risk of an individual developing it,” he said.

Do you think of unpronounceable words, or dusty books from centuries ago, or perhaps lengthy sermons? If you had to choose between studying theology and reading a book on practical tips for your daily life, which would you choose?

For many of us moms, the mere thought of studying theology seems way beyond what our daily life can handle. We might think, At this stage in my life, I can’t learn theology. My life is consumed and overwhelmed with the daily duties of motherhood. Perhaps we think that our time might be better spent reading up on ways to help our child sleep, or on the best nutritional choices for our growing child, or how to keep our preschooler from throwing a tantrum in the middle of the checkout lane.

But the truth is we desperately need theology for all our daily duties of motherhood. We need theology for bedtime battles, feeding worries, the grocery store, and everything else in between.

[Editor’s Note: Tolerance is faithlessness. We have the right to self defense and the defense of our loved ones should a criminal force a threat to life in other areas and the state protects us. But as seen above, our hands are tied and yet we do as much as the state allows. The murderous mother and abortionist pose a threat to life and the state should express a faith in God and arrest murders and make abortion impossible. In the event we find ourselves having to intervene as responsible citizens, we should backed in making a citizen’s arrest of a potential murderer rather than appealing with signs, but that seems all too far fetched and foreign.]

Is our religious freedom here in America limited to freedom of belief but not freedom of expression?1 There’s a difference. You see, more and more we’re noticing the media and courts expressing their religious beliefs when they say that the rest of us are free to have our beliefs but we, unlike the elite, just can’t act on them. As one opinion piece says,

Religious freedom is integral to this country. It must—and will—be protected. But what is being increasingly recognized is that religious freedom gives us all a right to our beliefs. This right, though, like all our rights, has limits . . . Religious liberty can’t be used by businesses to turn away lesbian and gay couples seeking to celebrate a relationship, or by religiously associated nonprofits who treat women employees like second-class citizens by denying contraceptive coverage.

So, basically, what this writer and others are saying is that religious belief is protected in America, but not the expression of it. But what’s the point of even having religious beliefs if you can’t act on them? That’s ridiculous! If you can’t act on your religious beliefs and convictions, then your religious freedoms become nothing more than a meaningless phrase. What exactly is religious freedom protecting if it’s not allowing me the right to act on what I believe?

“Wait Till It’s Free” is an entertaining and provocative look at the current healthcare crisis. This film takes a hard and honest look at the way we do healthcare in America by looking at every relevant aspect of modern medicine, from the escalating cost of health insurance to the move towards universal government healthcare. The film asks what kind of alternatives there are for families caught between expensive insurance-based coverage and the “Free” government solutions. The film explores the alternatives for individuals, churches, and families, and offers moving and enlightening stories about those that have chosen to follow innovative and independent approaches to healthcare. We journe...xtraordinary information you won’t find anywhere else. Along the way, we met authorities like Dr. Ron Paul (former U.S. Congressman), and John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods), as well as British experts Theodore Dalrymple (journalist and retired physician) and MEP Daniel Hannan (a British representative to the European Union). We engage a host of other experts from both sides of the gurney, meeting patients suffering the burdens of socialized medicine and doctors isolated from their patients by crippling regulation. This film goes miles beneath the surface of ObamaCare to expose the 100-year progression of socialized medicine in America. Traveling to my home country of Scotland, I ferret out the eerie truth about waiting lines, death panels, and total disregard for human life in Great Britain’s socialized healthcare system.

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